...I feel anxious for the fate of our monarchy, or democracy, or whatever is to take place. I soon get lost in a labyrinth of perp...lexities; but, whatever occurs, may justice and righteousness be the stability of our times, and order arise out of confusion. Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience and perseverance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

In the labyrinth of a difficult text, we find unmarked forks in the path, detours, blind alleys, loops that deliver us back to our... point of entry, and finally the monster who whispers an unintelligible truth in our ears.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

"Babylon," exclaimed Rolf, who had to look down again and again at this net of shimmering strings of beads, this skein of light, t...his endless flowerbed of electric blossoms ... this labyrinth of rectangular windows threaded by gleaming canals, which is repeated over and over again with no change,... half order as though on a chessboard, half confusion, as though the Milky Way had fallen down from the sky ... a mosaic of colored fragments, but mobile, yet at the same time lifeless and cold as glass, then again the Bengal lights of a stage witches' sabbath,... an orgy of discord, of harmony, an orgy of the everyday, technological and mercantile above all; you immediately think of the Arabian Nights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The vast majority of individual termites, belonging to the most highly evolved species, never leave their crowded fortress city, c...ould not see anything if they did, spend their entire existence in the narrow chambers and narrower tunnels of a labyrinth where they were born and where they breathe perpetually the damp, carbon dioxide atmosphere and dread more than anything else being compelled to leave it, even for an instant. The lives of certain human city dwellers who spend their days in air-conditioned offices, pass from them through tunnels of the subway to narrow chambers in some housing development, may seem remotely analogous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

This city is neither a jungle nor the moon.... In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is... a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Even beyond their deaths, the two novelists stand in contrariety. Tolstoy, the foremost heir to the traditions of the epic; Dostoe...vsky, one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare; Tolstoy, the mind intoxicated with reason and fact; Dostoevsky, the contemner of rationalism, the great lover of paradox; Tolstoy, the poet of the land, of the rural setting and pastoral mood; Dostoevsky, the arch-citizen, the master-builder of the modern metropolis in the province of language; Tolstoy, thirsting for the truth, destroying himself and those about him in excessive pursuit of it; Dostoevsky, rather against the truth than against Christ, suspicious of total understanding and on the side of mystery; Tolstoy, "keeping at all times," in Coleridge's phrase, "in the high road of life"; Dostoevsky, advancing into the labyrinth of the unnatural, into the cellarage and morass of the soul; Tolstoy, like a colossus bestriding the palpable earth, evoking the realness, the tangibility, the sensible entirety of concrete experience; Dostoevsky, always on the verge of the hallucinatory, of the spectral, always vulnerable to daemonic intrusions into what might prove, in the end, to have been merely a tissue of dreams; Tolstoy, the embodiment of health and Olympian vitality; Dostoevsky, the sum of energies charged with illness and possession.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

And haughtier-headed Burke that proved the State a tree,That this unconquerable labyrinth of the birds, century after centur...y,Cast but dead leaves to mathematical equality....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »